Student Radicals Beware:
This Could Happen to
You!

- or -

Hell no, we won't... Hey look, a sale on tie dye!

Next time, the revolution will not be televised. But don't worry if
you
can't get front row seats. Just look real close, and you too can
watch the next revolution being nipped in the bud at a University Campus
near you! Here's what to look for:

Some students with "concerns" are in need of a forum to air
them. These students don't think of their problems as
"concerns," they think of them as changes they want to make. When people
start talking about "concerns," the locus of the problem is shifted to
the students who want to change something. Now, what needs to be changed
is not necessarily the objective situation, but the subjective state
("concern") of the people who want to change something. Usually
these kids are at least into their sophomore or junior year--freshmen
don't really know what's going on yet.

These "concerned" students are promptly approached by a
representative of the system, who acts really friendly and supportive.
This co-opter dude offers to meet with some of them and address their
"concerns." After much delay, there is a meeting, at which they decide
to have another meeting. This happens for a while as a
committee is slowly assembled, which is going to meet sometime in the
spring. Then that spring, oh, gee golly gosh, things are pretty busy
with finals and all--is June OK? Oh, that's right, you kids won't be
here in June....

Well, the poor students have probably pretty much run out of steam by
then. But some of the stalwarts who weren't seniors last year might come
back and try to get the ball rolling again. The same pattern happens
again the next year, except that now of course the bureaucrats
have come up with all kinds of bullshit reasons why the students'
"concerns" are valid, but pretty much any actions they might want to
take to alter aspects of objective reality that correspond to those
"concerns" are well-intentioned, but...

By this point, some of the more
clever and/or pissed-off dissidents might catch on, but some of the
others
either won't catch on or they'll be addicted to the power trip they get
from mid-level bureaucrats "listening" to their "concerns" and
pretending to take them seriously. So then maybe a schism will take
place between the "extremists" and the "co-opted" dissidents--hey,
nobody wants to join a
fragmnented movement, so it's pretty much dead in the water. If there's
no
schism, then the movement might coalesce into an ossified arm of the
bureaucracy (heck, they might even informally modify the job description
of some mid-level bureaucrat to deal part-time with the "issues" raised
by
the protesters--success!) that continues to "address" their "concerns."

By
this time, most of the core group are either about to graduate or about
to
be seniors, and they're not going to be there much longer anyway, so a
lot
of them just give up. A few kids here and there may still "have
concerns," but you can't please everybody! For the most part the
interests
of all parties will have been served--objective reality doesn't change
one
iota, so the system is happy, and the "concerns" that were the problem
in
the first place have been "addressed."